1. Technical Field
The present invention relates to the field of electronic Business (e-Business), and more particularly, to a method and apparatus for creating and exposing order status within a supply chain having disparate systems.
2. Description of the Related Art
The pervasiveness of the Internet has allowed companies to exploit electronic communications to engage in what is commonly known as e-Business activities with their customers. E-business involves conducting business on the Internet and not only includes buying and selling goods and services, but can also include servicing customers and collaborating with trading or business partners. To accommodate this vast range of activities, companies utilize a variety of channels for interacting with Web sites that offer e-Business activities.
A channel is a particular communication medium or a logical medium that can be used to offer a subset of activities that conglomerate to form e-Business activity. For example, a channel for providing book reviews can be a subset of book selling activities in a book selling e-Business. Each channel can support various modes of access. For example, a book review channel can provide access to the book selling e-Business activity through Web browsers, wireless devices such as wireless access protocol (WAP) enabled phones and personal digital assistants (PDA's). As demand for e-Business activities increases, so does the need to provide additional channels to accommodate a variety of e-Business activities.
A large number of vendor products have been developed to provide additional channels that can accommodate a variety of e-Business activities. Many vendor products can support one or more limited channels and are typically targeted towards specialized activities within a particular industry. Still, in order to diversify the number of available channels, a company has to purchase, install and operate multiple vendor application products. Diversification is eminent since no singular vendor product provides a complete solution capable of supporting all the e-Business activities within a particular industry. These vendor products have typically been developed independent of other vendors and in a piecemeal fashion to meet existing customer demand. Despite this piecemeal implementation, there is no planned support for vendor application products inter-operating with each other in a larger e-Business framework which includes the full range of supported channels. These vendor solutions which are independently developed for supporting different channels and which have different architectures are called disparate systems. Significantly, disparate systems make it very difficult to integrate diversified e-Business solutions.
Each trading partner within an e-Business transaction chain can utilize one or more of these disparate systems. A trading partner is a business that provides a specialized service. For example, in order to satisfy a customer order for widgets, the transaction can involve trading partners such as a retailer, a manufacturer, a distributor, and shippers. Since these trading partners are typically independent organizations, each trading partner can have a unique or proprietary information technology (IT) solution.
The use of disparate systems among trading partners can significantly limit a customer's ability to track a particular transaction from initiation of an order to the receipt of a good or service. Consequently, it can be difficult, if not impossible, for a customer or a trading partner to accurately track an order as it moves throughout the supply chain. While a customer may have the ability to track an order while it is within the possession of a particular trading partner, the ability to track the order can be lost once the order passes to another trading partner in the chain. Furthermore, a customer is often burdened by having to utilize a plurality of channels and interfaces in order to access tracking information. For example, a customer might have to utilize a web browser interface to track an order with one trading partner and then have to use a telephone to track the same order with another trading partner.